A listener named Pfeiffer writes in to ask this, "Pastor John, you mentioned in your recent podcast, podcast episode 233, about your trip to the Middle East and the need for young people to devote and give their lives to an unreached people group. I'm a young man in college and I'm just wondering what it would look like for a young person like me to move forward on a call like this.

Where do I start?" That is an absolutely crucial question because my guess is there are a lot of people in churches where not a lot of missions focus exists and therefore there's not a lot of practical help. So let me try to give some. Where to start if God gives the slightest tug toward the unreached peoples of the world?

Start with your Bible and prayer. Read your Bible with the question, "What does this have to do with world missions?" And you will be amazed. If you just put it all through the grid of missions, then pray earnestly every day, "God, please cause your name to be hallowed in my life." That's the Lord's Prayer.

"Make your name great and treasured and praised and valuable in my life. Bring your kingdom through my life. Show me the most fruitful path of your will for my life. Give me a sense of yieldedness to your leading. Prepare me in every way for your service. Show me yourself and how I can serve you." So that a young person who's, say, 13 or 15 or 16, if a young person prays that prayer every day, God's going to do amazing things.

He is. He won't neglect a prayer like that coming out of the heart of a young person. And then thirdly, be a part of a good gospel preaching, missions-minded church. Now that may not be easy for a kid because he's going to go where his parents are going and the church may or may not be a missions-powerful church.

If you're not at one, pray that God will reform your church. Be an instrument of reformation among the young people. In the history of missions, young people have gotten together to talk and pray about missions and have read things about missions and have become the explosive agents of reform in the church instead of waiting around for the church to get reformed so that they could be inspired about missions.

Seek to have an older and a younger friend or friends who share your interests and talk to them about missions. If you can get to know some missionaries, talk to them, write to them, ask them all your questions. Find out who the missionaries are at your church or if you don't have any, find some through friends and write to them and ask them what it's like and give them your very particular questions.

Go to visit them on the mission field. Do a short-term missionary project. Lots of people wind up in long-term missions because they did a short-term project that missionaries find helpful, not just that you find interesting. You want to serve when you go. You want to serve. You're not there for entertainment and you're not there for a cross-cultural experience.

You're there to serve and you get all that other stuff thrown in. Read missionary biography. Read William Carey, A Faithful Witness is the name of the book by Timothy George and there are others. Read To the Golden Shore by Courtney Anderson, the biography of Adoniram Judson. Read John Patton's autobiography.

Read Peace Child and Lords of the Earth and Eternity in Their Hearts by Dawn Richardson. These are books that will just fire your imagination and stir up your faith and your hope and your joy. Read Hudson Taylor and his story written by his grandchildren or his own book, Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret.

Read history of missions like Stephen Neal's history of missions or Dana Robert, Christian missions. Look at websites like joshuaproject.net and try to understand the scope of the need and the nature of unreached peoples. Check out online mission agencies. Get to know a few mission agencies. First start with your own denomination.

If you're in a church and it has a denomination and they have a world missions board, ask your pastor what it is, how to get in touch with it, if it has a website and just get to know your own denominational mission focus. And then outside that, there are lots of interdenominational mission boards and I think it would be great just to scan their websites and read about what God's doing.

And here's a few of them. Pioneers, Frontiers, Wycliffe, TEAM, to every tribe, Action International Ministries, AIM, SIM, IMB, WEC, SEND, SEND. These are all, you can rewind this podcast and just go online, say type in mission agency in one of those and you can find out all kinds of things that God is doing and maybe be stirred up for a particular place or people.

And maybe the last thing I'd say is come to the Cross Conference in Louisville. This is a conference that I was part of founding and the first one, we got about 3,500 folks signed up. So I guess I'm hoping for 4,000 or 5,000 young people, these are students and seniors in high school I think could be included.

So Louisville, December 27 to 28, you can go online and find thecrosscon.com and be a part of that. That is a tremendous encouragement when you're with a whole lot of other students who have the same kind of questions and the same kind of prayers you do. So my prayer is that God will make this question that's been asked here, the question of thousands, thousands of young people and that they'll raise them and seek to find all the practical ways that God has of showing them a pathway into missions.

I pray that God will raise up an army of goers in our day among young people with the gospel of peace. Yes. Amen. Thank you, Pastor John. And just to reiterate the importance of the Cross Conference, which begins on December 27th in Louisville, Kentucky, it's a large conference with several excellent speakers.

And for more information about everything offered at the conference, check out the website at crosscon.com. Crosscon.com. It's spelled C-R-O-S-S-C-O-N.com. And we'll be back on Monday asking the question, where did all these Calvinists come from? Until then, I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening. 1 The Cross Conference 2016 Experience Session 1 Page 1 of 2 © The Cross Conference 2016 Experience Session 1, Page 1 of 2 Page 2 of 3 Page 3 of 4 Page 5 of 6